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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

251–260 of 851 posts

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#251
post #107

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free an…

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than trad…

Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything.

I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#254

Google is winning on every front except... marketing (Google has a chatbot?), trust (who knew the founding fathers were so diverse?), safety (where's the 2.5 Pro model card?), market share (fully one in ten internet users on the planet are weekly ChatGPT users), and, well, vibes (who's rooting for big G, exactly?). But I will admit, Gemini Pro 2.5 is a legit good model. So, hats off for that.

Add to this list apps. As in ChatGPT and Anthropic have nice desktop software applications for Mac and Windows.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#255
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than trad…

You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendation…

> You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way.

I highly doubt advertisers will settle for a solution that's less profitable. That would be like settling for plain-text ads without profiling data and microtargeting. Google tried that in the "don't be evil" days, and look how that turned out.

Besides, astroturfing and influencer-driven campaigns are very popular. The modern playbook is to make advertising blend in with the content as much as possible, so that the victim is not aware that they're being advertised to. This is what the majority of ads on social media look like. The natural extension of this is for ads to be subtly embedded in chatbot output.

"You don't sound well, Dave. How about a nice slice of Astroturf pizza to cheer you up?"

And political propaganda can be even more subtle than that...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#256
As long as Google continues to hamstring themselves with censorship for no reason, I can't use their products. The other day I asked gemini 2.5 pro "which british ceo said that his company's products were bad" and the response was

> I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.

https://g.co/gemini/share/cb3afc3e7f78

Chatgpt 4o correctly identified the guy as Ratner and provided the relevant quotes.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke's on them, because I don't have any loyalty to an LLM provider. There's very close to zero switching costs, both on the consumer front and the API front; no real distinguishing features and no network effects; just whoever has the best model at this point in time.

I'm assuming Google's play here is to bleed its competitors of money and raise prices when they're gone. Building top-tier models is extremely expensive and will probably remain so. Even companies that do it "on the cheap," like DeepSeek, pay tens of millions to train a single model, and total expenditures for infrastructure and salaries are estimated to surpass $1 billion. This market has an extremely high cost of e…

They’ll also need a fleet of humanoid robots eventually to compete with Elon’s physical world data collection plans.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#258
AI is essentially a hardware/electricity arms race.

Whatever model is at the top can be surpassed if a competitor has enough compute scale. We are rapidly approaching the era where it’s difficult to have enough power in one campus. Distributed sites are needed if models continue to scale at 4.7x/year (see Epoch.ai) simply from a power perspective. You have to put the data centers where the power is and connect them together.

I believe the era of distributed training is already here however not everyone will be able to distribute training to multiple sites using their scale up networks. Their scale out networks will not be ready. So it could be that we see models plateau until distributed training infra is available.

I see the infrastructure side of AI and based on HW build out; Google has been slow to build and is behind everywhere.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#259
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than trad…

Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything. I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.

Once again, our hope is for the Chinese to continue driving the open models. Because if it depends on American big companies the future will be one of dependency on closed AI models.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#260

This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at sca…

From the article: > I’m forgetting something. Oh, of course, Google is also a hardware company. With its left arm, Google is fighting Nvidia in the AI chip market (both to eliminate its former GPU dependence and to eventually sell its chips to other companies). How well are they doing? They just announced the 7th version of their TPU, Ironwood. The specifications are impressive. It’s a chip made for the AI era of inf…

Nice to see that they added that, but that section wasn't in the article when I wrote that comment.
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